Our first season with our Catamaran Dragonfly is complete! We had a wonderful summer onboard our new to us catamaran Dragonfly. What a completely different experience it is to transition from a monohull to a cat. The stability and space that you have in a cat is amazing, however the ability to point high when close hauled and the feeling of being healed over racing across the ocean at 8 knots is nothing but thrilling also. Hence the ever so debated cat vs mono. My opinion is we love them both. Each have their pros and cons and it is 100% a personal preference.

That being said, we should cover a few things we found out during our first season on our mooring in East Greenwich, RI.

First off, watch your amp hours!! Yep, we came back to our mooring after being gone for a week after being onboard and we had a low battery bank alarm. Just a note, we have 300 Watts of solar but that’s not enough to run the fridge and Engel freezer all the time while we are away. A few cloudy days and a AMP hungry fridge compressor and TADA – dead batteries! So we had to pull up to a dock and charge them via our 110V charger for a few days.

Secondly, bottom cleaning is a must do in RI on a regular basis. Especially the props and sail drive legs. After about a month on our mooring we decided to take a little day sail and head out to a island anchorage nearby to do some swimming and get a change of scenery. We headed out and as we were in the channel and picked up speed we noticed our speed was low and a slight vibration. We knew this to be strange so we turned around and headed back to our mooring. As we approached our mooring ball I tried to spin the boat 180 deg to go into the wind to pick it up. I got about 120 deg around and the boat would not turn anymore. We could not overcome the 15 knot wind. At this point I assumed we had a fouled prop and we threw out the anchor and held fast. I dove on the props and sure enough they were fouled up pretty good. I cleaned them off, checked that the drives engaged properly and came back aboard. We started up the 2 engines and engaged the drives to move forward. We moved ahead to our mooring ball bringing up the anchor at the same time and we were good to go. After that day we now clean our props EVERY time we move the boat.

Finally we found that we absolutely love the water taxi service. We get a free ride to our vessel each time we need it. We have little wear & tear on our tender as we only use it to tour around in and then leave it up on our davits. They are friendly and we get all the new scuttlebutt and happenings around the area. Our mooring field area is quiet and the water is warm – which makes for great swimming.

At the end of the season we hauled out at a Safe Harbor marina about a 3 hour sail. There are few marinas in RI with a travel lift big enough to handle our Beam. We also had a small hull wet spot repair to complete and we wanted to have it professionally done. We also had a few more projects over the winter before we launched in 2022. We reached the marina and the Safe Harbor NEB dock hands were great, they were at the dock to greet us and had no issues handling our lines. We winterized our plumbing and engines in the water before we left and removed our sails for the season.

Another sailing season under our belts.

James & Tammy